In hospitals, medicines of several kinds taken out from different types of medicine containers may be mixed to prepare a mixture medicine, and the mixture medicine may be administered to inpatients, or the like. Such an operation of mixing medicines is usually performed manually by nurses or pharmacists (hereinafter referred to as an operator), for whom it is a heavy burden. In addition, the medicine containers that contain medicines have variety in type and shape. Also, in a case where an anticancer agent is dissolved by mixing with a liquid medicine, the mixture solution is harmful to humans and can be dangerous if the mixture solution leaks out from the medicine container to external air. Therefore, the mixing of medicines such as an anticancer agent needs to be operated in a work space of the hospital which is designed in consideration of safety (e.g. in a safety cabinet). In other words, operators are required to efficiently perform the mixing operation in the work space designed in consideration of safety. In order to ease such an operation, there has been suggested a device for safely and automatically sucking medicines from medicine containers (see, for example, Patent Literature 1).
FIG. 22 illustrates a structural view of a dispensing device of Patent Literature 1 as an example of a conventional medicine mixing device.
The dispensing device 1 illustrated in FIG. 22 is a device for dispensing radioisotope, i.e., a radioactive medicine that is hard to be handled. The dispensing device 1 dispenses a radioactive medicine from a storage container 4 located at the top of the device into a mixing container 5 located at the bottom of the device by moving an injection syringe 6 by means of a lifting mechanism 2 and a rotating mechanism 3. Radioactive medicines require to be handled with great care. Therefore, the storage container 4 is fixed to the device by a container holding portion 7 provided at the top of the device. The radioactive medicine is sucked into the injection syringe 6 by sticking a needle 6a of the injection syringe 6 into the storage container 4. Subsequently, the injection syringe 6 is moved to a position near the mixing container 5 by means of the lifting mechanism 2 and the rotating mechanism 3, and then the radioactive medicine is dispensed by discharging the radioactive medicine from the injection syringe 6 into the mixing container 5.